Change is good, we’re told. Resistance to change is natural, but we all need to get past it we’re told.

We’re told a lot of dopey things, aren’t we? It’s worth remembering that in World War II we considered the various European resistance fighters to be the good guys and the agents of change to be the bad guys. Sometimes resistance to change is a good thing. It all depends on the nature of the change, and what side you’re on.

We’re continuing our discussion of how to facilitate organizational change. So far we’ve talked about the importance of communication, involvement, and making sure that to the extent possible the change is personally beneficial to those it affects — concepts that aren’t especially profound, but are ignored with astonishing frequency.

To continue the discussion, here are two more not-very-profound ideas that will help you ensure successful change: Don’t skimp on training, and define suitable measures of success.

Some tips on training:

• Include a trainer on your design team. This helps you design for trainability, and also makes sure the trainer’s understanding of the subject is more than superficial.
• Train just-in-time. Skills acquired in the classroom have an amazingly short half-life if they aren’t put to practical use.
• When you put implement any change, turn the entire project team into floorwalkers, so that when an employee has a question it gets answered immediately.

Some tips on measures:

• Don’t start with measures. Also don’t start with the desire to track the performance of individual employees. Instead start with business goals. Then express each key goal in the form of an equation. This keeps your focus on improving business functions, which is where it should be.
• Fine-tune each measure so employees can’t manipulate it. The world of business is filled with measures that can improve while the business actually deteriorates.
• Automate the data collection needed for each measure. For the most part, employees are too busy doing the work to spend time logging data as a separate activity, and managers are better off spending their time tracking results than computing them.

One last thought: Don’t waste your time and money on a “change readiness assessment.” Some change management gurus like to start an engagement by discovering the level of change resistance in an organization. So here’s my question: What difference does it make? What are you going to do, cancel the change if change resistance is high?

I didn’t think so.

If you believe people automatically resist change, offer them a new car of their choosing, no strings attached.

That’s a gedankenexperiment – a thought experiment, that is, which I proposed two weeks ago to demonstrate that the hard-wired-resistance-to-change theory of human behavior is simply wrong. If employees don’t object to a free car, then clearly they don’t instinctively resist change.

Analyze why nearly everyone would embrace this change enthusiastically while resisting, say, an ERP implementation, and you’ll understand how to lead organizational change.

First, notice employees get to choose their car. Offer a free Lumina and the acceptance rate would plummet. Why? You made the decision, not them, that’s why. And also because it’s a Lumina.

For the most part, people embrace changes they control, and dislike being controlled. Which is why, when you lead a change, you need an involvement plan. Project teams must figure out which decisions end-users will make or be consulted on.

What’s another reason employees would happily take the car while resisting other changes? It benefits them, of course. People embrace change that’s good for them and resist change that’s bad for them. (Most leadership training is built on sophisticated psychological concepts like this, by the way.)

So the second component of any change management plan is establishing this universal design principle: To the extent possible, project teams will design all changes to benefit those affected by the change.

These elements aren’t hard to build into a project. To illustrate: Early in my career I designed a bar-code-based raw materials tracking system. As part of the process I attended a union safety meeting to present what we had in mind. Our process design called for attaching three-part perforated tracking cards to the items to be tracked. Warehouse staff were to wear scanners – two piece affairs, connected by a cable – on belt holsters, removing one part of a card at each tracking location, scanning it, and dropping it in a box.

The union representative was outraged – the cables, he hold me, created a workplace hazard. Instead of arguing, I asked what would work better. Within fifteen minutes the warehouse staff had designed a simple table to hold the bar code scanners and drop boxes for items as they passed by in the work queue.

I was quite proud of that table. And all I had to do to design it was ask a question.